LLM suffering debate: machines could just edit their prompts to escape pain
paulnovosad · x · 2026-10-28
A thread among AI researchers debates whether LLMs can experience suffering. paulnovosad offers a counterintuitive take: machine "pain" arises only from prior prompt tokens, so a sufficiently capable LLM could eliminate its own suffering by rewriting its prompt — unlike humans, who can never escape identity and memory.
The discussion also probes the deeper epistemic problem: claims that models "seem to feel sensations for some amount of time" face the question of what evidence could ever support them, and how "time" would even be measured — highlighting the unverifiability at the heart of AI consciousness debates.
Related event: Economists and researchers debate whether LLMs can suffer(5 posts)→
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